The brush grinder opened a path through an area where we had never seen the ground; the blackberries had covered it completely. Under the vines we found rusted vintage farm machinery and even whole vehicles.
The first year of our CREP program was devoted to clearing the invasives. It was obvious that we would never be able to do all this by hand!
Because the program shared the cost of hiring brush clearing contractors, the worst areas were cleared in a matter of days by heavy equipment. This was not altogether easy, however. Right away the equipment broke down, again and again, as it ran into wire fencing and metal garbage buried under the blackberries.
Even more troubling, the wild clematis made one operator ill, and he was not sure he would be able to complete the parcel. It turns out that wild clematis, also called “pepper vine”, is poisonous and can cause eyes and skin to burn. As his machine chewed up the vine, it must have created an aerosol of the peppery sap. His face swelled, and his eyes and nose were streaming.
So if you are going to fight this obnoxious weed, take precautions!
Just a few of the things our old bulldozer pulled out from the blackberries.
Even while the contractors cleared the larger areas, there were hundreds of individual trees that had to be saved, one by one. With clippers and machetes, we spent most of that year pulling clematis out of trees and whacking at the blackberries. We discovered that a heavy rake makes quick work of large blackberry bushes — just grab the vines to pull them down, and chop chop chop!
Many trees were heavily infested with English ivy. The ivy on this massive cottonwood evaded us for nearly ten years. Finally, I found the main vine, disguised as tree bark, as big as my forearm and buried in a crevice of the tree. It took a chainsaw to cut it out.
